This 11-Year-Old Fit a Gaming System into an Altoids Tin

Elijah Horland is an avid Minecraft player, an accomplished novice builder, a raspberry pi enthusiast, and an urban explorer. Currently studying kayaking and street-luge for the summer, you can follow his travels at http://www.notabomb.org

Elijah Horland is an avid Minecraft player, an accomplished novice builder, a raspberry pi enthusiast, and an urban explorer. Currently studying kayaking and street-luge for the summer, you can follow his travels at http://www.notabomb.org

He wanted a retro-game console that could be playable both on the road in hotels, guest houses, and summer venues… and could be expanded to use as an internet gaming and retro-computing system. It plays all the games from Apple II, DOS, all the pre 2006 consoles and handhelds from Nintendo to Sony… even Vertex games.

What he came up with is a mashup of the console style raspberry pi builds, the portable builds, the battery box builds, and the USB pi zero expansions.

It was a good way to use the skills he’d picked up over the winter playing with Velleman kits and Pi builds.

It’s durable enough to travel around, hits all the goals of the build, and relies on the existing infrastructure of WiFi and HDMI at travel destinations.

Build time was just under four weeks of kid-time… a few hours every few days.

These are gifts, his next project is to build out a 7″ touchscreen Pi3 platform with a FONA module, batteries, a clock and some other goodies to boot either under Rasbian or the upcoming official Adroid release.

This was the first road test, this weekend at a holiday inn express between camp sessions — all goals met.

The battery controller is play or charge, not both at the same time. Research indicates there should be a jumper or solder ball solution on the board somewhere. Does anyone have good ideas?

Elijah Horland is an avid Minecraft player, an accomplished novice builder, a raspberry pi enthusiast, and an urban explorer. Currently studying kayaking and street-luge for the summer, you can follow his travels at http://www.notabomb.org

Elijah Horland is an avid Minecraft player, an accomplished novice builder, a raspberry pi enthusiast, and an urban explorer. Currently studying kayaking and street-luge for the summer, you can follow his travels at http://www.notabomb.org